


Like Honey or Blood

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Empire Building [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Civil War, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, American Civil War, Amputation, Angst with a Happy Ending, Disabled Character, M/M, Magical Healing Mushrooms, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconstruction AU, Recreational Drug Use, Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-06 16:10:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6760915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Georgia, 1865. In the camp when he thought of Macon he thought of Remus waiting in the hollow at the end of the road into the hills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Honey or Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Nota bene(s): This is a story taking place in Georgia just after the American Civil War. Thus, be wary of mentions of slavery. There is a relationship with troubling disclosure/consent issues in Remus's past - read safe if you need (I would stop at the moment when Remus gives Sirius the letter - okay to restart at the next scene). And lastly, I am serious about the violence, though it probably reflects what is typical of most Civil War novels, films etc.

_ Macon, Georgia  
May 1865 _

\--

In the camp when he thought of Macon he thought of Remus waiting in the hollow at the end of the road into the hills. At the time he would not have claimed attachment or emotion beyond the obvious. It felt as though he were suffocating in the Spring humidity and drawn deeper inexorably into the forest where indeed Remus lived with his father in a hovel though the elder Lupin was frequently abroad drunk or hunting in the wet shadow for mushrooms. Walking there on paths he could not discern from the gloom he felt very young and sort of drunk and dizzy and his mouth was dry and static and he thought any minute lightning might strike him and he watched at the hem of Remus’s white work shirt where he had tucked it into his dungarees. He recalled at first he had entertained Remus was a witch. It seemed there was scarcely another explanation. 

In his bunkhouse on the plain below Chicago ravaged by the winter and grey to the very bones of itself he pressed beneath the itchy wet wool blankets while above the hail slammed on the tin roof like a contingent of hellhounds — he licked his palm tasting dirt and blood and the remnant of his meal (perpetually beans, beans and the scrapmeat of some unlucky horse) and passed his hand down over his belly and lower pressing his face inside his shirt and smelling himself unwashed and not above imagining it was in fact some other upon the narrow cot with him — the old sweat like a touch of earth or cave air. And his calluses from work so unfeeling that for the necessary moment he could envision very nearly — 

\--

In the camp when he thought of Macon he thought of the smell of the rain and the books in his father’s study and the collard greens prepared by the scullery woman Beulah and consumed by the slaves and secreted to him in tiny ceramic bowls covered in checker cloth when he crept to the kitchen to beg picnic supplies and he thought of all of it and the big swarming sacred thing like summer gnats that got strung up like laundry somewhere between the forest and the old white houses. 

\--

Other boys were from elsewhere but none of them of any regiment whose insignia or numerology he recognized. Sirius and one James Potter out of Athens alone of their regiment survived the march to Chicago and James was one of scores of those interred who had died that winter. Never before had Sirius been West of Memphis nor North of Louisville but he was led chained to a long line of his fellows as if in deserved retribution to labor cracking stones by the roadside in the high and thick North woods while elsewhere other men fought and died over some grand conceptuality. 

At the first he had been brought to the commander of the camp who was a major in the Union army by the name of Amos Dundee. He had been demoted to his post after rash decisions made on some Virginia battlefield and he drank overmuch. Sirius had never made the rank that privileged exposure to secrets despite his family name and his father’s at that point bankrolling half the confederacy but it was seemingly on account of said family name and unfortunate resemblance that he was summoned into the major’s company at all, unshaven with the white of the thick dust blown into the stubble across his chin and cheeks and above his nose such that he was sure he looked not unlike his father. When he had been enlisted his hair had been cut short but now it was growing out long again about his ears and against the back of his neck where it curled artfully when he sweat. 

“I don’t know anything,” he said. The major chewed his cigar. “I’m on your side.” 

“How come you wearing grey if you on our side.” 

“I’m from Georgia. My father —”

“I wanted to hear about your father I would’ve asked.” 

It went on as such. Finally he was allowed to depart and bathe in the waning yellow ghost of the distant sun. 

\--

At the end of the war he took the trains as far as he could toward home carrying all his remaining belongings in a rucksack and affrighted deeply of what he might find in the valley where he had been raised. He had been two years at war and two in the camp and he was possessed by nightmare. Cannonfire rolled at him out of every darkness. Altogether more like a stampede of horses than like thunder. 

He had not meant to be a killer of men and was haunted upon waking by the memory of it. He remembered once he had wanted to be a writer of philosophy in the vein of Locke or Rousseau and at that juncture in his life he had been capable of love or something like it. But also he had been sixteen. When he came back to his homeland burnt by Sherman on the long march to the sea he was twenty-two and felt as though he had lived in this bruised and amorphous ghost of world since its atavism. Of course in the interim he had thought after Remus — his first lover but not, by now, his singular — and wondered if he lived still and would’ve written him but he did not recall the name of Remus’s regiment. 

They had parted at seventeen under uncertain terms when Remus enlisted at his father’s insistence (he was interested in the paycheck alone) and rode out of town on a new and halfwild horse in a stiffly starched uniform looking handsome and scared shitless, under the command of an Atlanta lieutenant called Greyback. They had hardly discussed the war because they hardly discussed anything. Remus had known what mushrooms the Indians had used to prompt hallucinatory visions and they ate them in the woods and he watched Remus turn to a wolf and back again. In another week he was gone. At the town square when the ragtag corps gathered Remus’s father was drunk and stumbling in the red dust toasting the riders with an overfull earthenware flask. 

Sirius’s parents had not had dealings with Lupins but the slaves had chiefly Beulah who bought fresh wild mushrooms of every shape and color and variety out the kitchen door in the dusk and it was as such that Sirius met the son when he took over the deliveries when his father was too egregiously hungover to work. They were thirteen. He could scarcely recall it now such had the war interrupted as with some monstrous surgical knife the function of his memory. Most of his parents’ slaves he had feared but he cared for Beulah who had mostly raised him and his brother and thus he would sit with her on occasion and taste her dishes for flavor and as he grew up he did it mostly to ire his parents and now he understood that all along she had tolerated him barely and he could hardly blame her. 

He was obliged to walk to Macon from Atlanta on the ruinous roads. He met folk of all kinds in degrees of destitution and new freedmen who eyed him reproachfully and young widows who resented his life from the porches where they held and rocked their fatherless children. And ever carpetbaggers from the North who rested in the waystations and were distrusted. Occasionally in the squalid hostels charred about their walls he was bought whiskey or gin by a shadowy figure in white who retracted again into the interior darkness. Once or twice he refused to drink on principle but usually he had slept poorly and required it. 

Someone asked with whom he had fought. Army of Tennessee, he said, as though he were reciting the times table. Under Bragg. Then for my life into the Northlands marched toward the camp in Chicago where a quarter died that February in the eternity of cold. Then along the Western roads — inside my own mind. 

He had fallen ill after his consignment to work in the camp hospital emptying slops and listening to boys cry for their mothers and their homelands which were their mothers and the warm humid wooden bower of the hills and the girls they would never see again and their children and their fathers who by now likely were also dead having gone the way of all fathers and all things. Sirius was told when he was sick he had asked after Beulah who indeed had bathed his brow in fever when he was young but he had woken several times in his extremity feeling around him like some mirage haze the air burning where it touched his skin and he had seen Remus sitting on the three-legged stool beside him. 

While breaking rocks he wondered if Remus was dead. And he thought for that life he would forsake his parents’ and perhaps even his brother who in the end he learned had died at Gettysburg alongside a myth, an army, a dream, a hope, an entitlement, an attempt at nation. That earth — the forest unslaked by blood. And the silent fields rolling like flesh intercut with the machination of war. Lincoln who could summon three hundred words on the subject as though there could ever be summation of such horror. He saw photographs and his brother’s name published among the missing and he read the listing of casualties again and again and saw none other he recognized. 

From Atlanta he walked ever toward the sea in the swath firebranded by Sherman late in 1864. The rural towns had not been burned so badly as the cities but the folk had lost a quorum of livestock and all their uncrippled sons and some of the courthouses had been razed. The thick trees were ever thinned and the hanging moss dragged down from them like a woman’s grey hair or like battlefield smoke that blew in the deep corduroy channels cut like crop furrows in the road by the Union warwagons and sometimes he saw uniform buttons glinting in the sun, or the rain washed out of the rich dust the leaden forms of defective bullets that had been abandoned on the march. 

He walked and smoked cigarettes and tried to stretch his mind back into its old treads but it would not go. When he went to refresh his tobacco in the general stores he passed often he could not afford it. The war had wiped the slate clean of distinction between them all and their great commonality now was desperation. And the nightly visitation of the beautiful ghost. He walked past fields of cotton untended. The rich red soil overgrown wild and leached by years. He bathed in a stream in the cold morning and the water carried a frost of white ash. Having squandered all the tobacco he smoked tea leaves for he had bitten his fingernails ragged and bloody and the dust stuck under them and in the creases of his palms. 

He came to his family home in Macon in a sunset to find it mostly burned, standing-ish in the East wing, slave quarters dust, vacant and silent but for the chewing wood beetles and the birds who spoke to one another about the carrion that had crawled in there to die. Skeletons of animals and shells of cicadas like ancient relics of arcane civilizations sitting rotten into the floorboards and the threadbare carpets like the tapestry of some faith erased from memory. He unfurled his bedroll in the parlor amidst the fine furniture thrown with dropcloths and collapsing sunbleached and ashy through the walls like great standing stones and he made a fire in the grand hearth and warmed his hands and feet and ate the last of the porridge he had carried from Chicago out of a cast iron skillet he salvaged from the kitchen. He slept two hours and awoken by nightmare set about wandering the wreckage by the light of a taper candle whose golden flame he held cupped in a hand once very steady and now ever trembling. Smudging the light in pale cacophony against the floors and the walls and the crooked portraits and all the ghosts in the darkness. As a child he thought he had seen hauntings on this property and he had heard whisperings amongst the slaves that he had passed to his brother who became so fearful he crept by night into their parents’ chambers and for that Sirius was beaten. He was befrighted now by the insidious possession of his mind — the sickness of fear and memory compounding into his dreams and increasingly even his waking, tendril fingers like the distant wind that moved the high clouds. 

In the morning faint with exhaustion he folded again his bedroll and walked to town where he took a room at the guesthouse alongside the prodigal sons of any number of Macon farm families with whom he had been forbidden from consorting in his youth. Sherman’s contingent had refrained from destruction where it was unprovoked and they had trusted the poor of the South over the rich to be Unionist or neutral and as such Sirius found in Macon only the wealthy slaveowning estates (like his own) had been razed, and the town courthouse. Rubble in the square and the vacant stands of ceremonial cannons confiscated by the Union column. He had dug up a few gold coins — Union dollars — in the wreckage of his family home and these he took to the general store for coffee and tobacco and a ham hock and a few bedraggled collard greens and back at the bunkhouse he cooked and ate and had a cigarette and slept fitfully in the butter spread of sun across his bed through the high window. 

\--

The proprietress of the general store did not know what had become of the mushroom hunter nor his son and she asked Sirius after her own who was missing at Antietam. 

“The Union had me in Chicago end of ’63,” said Sirius. 

“So he weren’t there either?”

“Not at Camp Douglas.” 

Her husband had died in Sherman’s seizure of Atlanta and she had sought her child now amidst all the veterans who had passed through in the months since Appomattox. It seemed she did not recognize Sirius and he was glad of it and as such he gives James’s name, feeling rather like a grave robber, when she asked. 

He walked in the sun, itself frail. He walked down the roads into the hills untouched by the interlocutor and he perused the maps inside his memory in search of the Lupins’ mushroom spots and to his chagrin found only one and it with but three delicate rounded morels soft inside and with the inner guts frilly as lace remaining there unharvested. He cut them with his knife and that night cooked them in the cast iron with bacon and the rest of the greens in the back firepit of the guesthouse overhung by liveoak beyond which the moon was ripe and soft as cheese summoning sounds from the forest. 

\--

He woke at noon having not shut his eyes til dawn as he could not turn his back to the darkness. At the door to his room was the proprietor. “Someone out front for you.” 

He splashed his face and neatened his hair in the scrap of mirror and dressed in his least rumpled clothes and still he was surprised that in the street was Remus. 

“Did you cut the mushrooms?” 

His voice was soft and he was sunburnt across the bridge of his nose and Sirius could tell from the way he leant and the strangeness of the boot that he was missing half his left leg from just above the knee. 

“I did.” 

They shook hands. Remus’s was cold. “I only ever showed you.” 

He was touched by that but bit his lip. “How’s your father.” 

“Dead. Your folks?” 

“The same I suspect. The house is burned.” 

“I saw it,” said Remus. “I went out there first. You left ashes warm.” 

They went over to the saloon at the corner of the square where Sirius had never in his life been and they found when they entered that the roof had been burned off and had yet to be replaced. They sat at a table in the long shadow of the West wall and Remus went to the bar and returned with a glass bottle of moonshine whose cork he removed with his teeth. 

“Where were you fighting?” 

“Tennessee. Then I got caught up — marched to a prison camp in Chicago.” 

“Murfreesburo?” 

“Yes. Stones’ River under Bragg. Got cut off from the column.” 

“I was there just for the latter end of it.” 

“Where did — ”

“Spotsylvania Courthouse,” said Remus. His tone was such Sirius knew that was the tail end of it. “Have you got a cigarette.” 

He passed the pouch of tobacco across the table to Remus who rolled one deftly. Under the table he had stretched his half-leg out in a way that would have hurt him had it all been real. Sirius had seen amputations done in the camp and had burned, afterwards, the offal in great cremation ovens. He took a sip of the clear rank liquor to quell his sudden wash of nausea. “I thought you were dead,” said Remus around the cigarette in his mouth. He had an expression on his face Sirius almost recognized and in the sun he was squinting and his eyes flashed like quartz in a fast-moving stream. 

“I’m not,” he said, though sometimes he wondered if it were true. 

“Right. I see you.” As though it were enough to bring him back from wherever he’d misplaced himself. His mind — his life. His good dreams. Remus was looking up ponderously into the open ceiling at the clouds moving and snatching apart above against the blue in the firmament. “I walked as fast as I could to town to see if it was you.” 

“Well it is me.” He wished he could touch their hands across the table. Instead he watched the spiral of smoke slip like a secret from Remus’s mouth into the still air. “Have you been staying at your old house?” 

“Ain’t none of it left anymore.” 

“I’m sure as hell sorry.” 

“No it’s — good riddance. I’ve been, you remember we had that lean-to out in the woods.” 

Sirius remembered. Remus was blushing just a little high across his cheekbones. “Have you been sleeping out there?” 

“Yes. Nowhere else.” 

“Well, the bunkhouse — ”

“I ain’t got like, a single Union dollar to my name and I can’t — well I don’t know how much I can do to barter.” 

“What about the mushrooms,” Sirius asked, “and you can come to my house. I can make some repairs. I think I could stand to be out there if I wasn’t alone.” 

It was very many perhapses. He had done some fixing in the camp with scavenged boards and nails he had had to sharpen against a stone, all to keep the frigid wind out. The house was different and yet the East wing stood. And indeed if there was someone else with him to watch at the darkness very likely he could shut his eyes more than thirty seconds without startling them open again at the sound of a branch against the glass. Remus was looking into the nearly-empty glass he held in his lap and from his cigarette hand on the table the smoke just floated upwards into the stillness. It was a lovely hand — he had lovely hands. They looked drawn by an artist: expressive and artful, and his fingers were very long and crooked, and there were a few scars and calluses, and a yellow stain between two of them from smoking. Sirius thought with this sudden spiraling draining feeling in his gut, he’ll say no. He’ll know what’s happened and he’ll say no. He regrets it all and he’ll say no. But he didn’t, and in fact after a long enough while he said “Alright.” 

\--

As a child he had thought the long meadows simmering into forest looked rather like battlefields out of ancient legend. The fens and pasture and the fallow farmland and the low carven ravines cut by the creeks bubbling through displaced stones. He had wandered with his brother and looked for Indian arrowheads and finally when they found none he had made a few of flaky shale and hid them for his brother to find. These he would keep in a chipped blue willow bowl in his bedroom until his enlistment and march to Gettysburg. This was before they fought and in the days when Sirius still lay awake at night worried his parents would send Regulus to an institution for the feeble-minded in Atlanta as they had threatened to before. Regulus was not so much feeble-minded as he hardly spoke except to himself but it was beat out of him by the time he was sent to military school in Richmond. 

He had walked in the fields in the high soft grass thinking of archaic and atavistic warfare between good and evil. An army who wore black and another who wore white camped at each edge of the field. The stiff wind across the long flat caught in his hair and tangled it up and when he returned home Beulah would straighten it in the kitchen. “Like a birds’ nest,” she would say. He would wash up and tie his hair back and go to dinner where he was obliged to sit beside his brother in silence and in his mind would echo the twang of bowstrings and the clash of swords and the screams of dying and impassioned men and the blood soaking into the earth which after all must have been the thing to have made it red. He made sketches with a hunk of charcoal on stolen butcherpaper that he shared with his brother alone. When he was eleven he learned to load and shoot a gun. 

Now he and Remus were obliged to walk slower than they had on their initial forays for mushrooms and otherwise on account of Remus’s leg or lack thereof, and the pastureland was overgrown and warwagons had been run through it creasing the thick green stiff as new corduroy and a distant storm visible just over the far hills moved reaching tendrils in the trees. 

“Can that thing get wet,” said Sirius, then regretted it. 

“The leather chafes,” said Remus. “Just some. It’s not so bad.” 

When he was a child on occasion he suspected there was something watching him from the woods. Like an eggwhite dripping down his spine smooth and chill and viscous. At first he thought it was a witch awaiting an appropriate opportunity to lure him into a wooded bower and an iron cookpot. Later in the humid and intoxicating throes of his sexual awakening he suspected it had always been Remus. Now he found himself searching the navy blues of a contingent of cleverly disguised Union soldiers. The forest was thick and cool and green and smelled like rain not having happened but coming and the earth was rich and dense and wild growing things and he remembered the Spring texture of it clenched in a fist, mud pressing moss and the crunch of a cicada shell. The way the red earth looked flaking from Remus’s freckled and scarred knees of which now of course one had been sacrificed to the lost cause. His ears had been ringing and his mouth was dry. There was a static in his brain perpetually that tasted like sweat and whatever was happening elsewhere could not faze him because it weighed nothing. He walked through most of his days in a thick golden haze like a strange and haunted slant of sunlight off the creek in the late afternoon. 

“Here’s a few,” said Remus. He could not crouch to cut the big white ramsheads so Sirius did. The wet earth was cool up through the knees of his pants and the fleshy dirt smell of the fungi was almost sweet and it rung some bell back so deep in his mind he was dizzy and he felt the strange heaviness of weeping in his jaw. He traced with a finger the curly and soft familiar frills like woodshavings and he recalled when he had been at war he had been too nervous to cut mushrooms to eat because he remembered Remus’s warnings about the poisonous lookalike varietals that had had smarter men dead or tripping laid out on the forest floor to go back themselves to dust. He passed the ramsheads up to Remus who tucked them in his bag. Sirius remembered they would have to fill the canvas and their arms and their pockets all with fungi to have enough to barter for half a rack of spareribs. It had exhilarated him when he was young to think he might have to work for his dinner because he was so unused to any bit of labor beyond schooling. But perhaps in these hungry days a bagful of mushrooms wouldn’t even get you oxtail.

They walked on. They found small gemmy puffballs Sirius cut lengthwise to prove weren’t poison deathcaps and they found a few black trumpet and brainy morels alien and phallic and strange, soft and tender and shy in the mulch of the earth. 

“We could probably barter most of these for a bit of venison and eat the rest,” said Remus at last. So at least it would not be oxtail. Nearly upon them now was the storm moving in the trees like a visitor and Sirius found himself every few moments looking intently over his shoulder toward the sound of the wind. Certainly Remus had noticed because there was an unfamiliar fold of concern in his brow. “Unless you want to look for the dreamy kind.” 

“Are there some close?” 

“Not so far.” 

“Well can you walk much more?” 

“No,” said Remus. His brow furrowed tighter still. “Kind of you to ask.” 

“I can’t carry you out of here,” Sirius told him. He had meant it to be funny but it was not. The corner of Remus’s mouth twisted. “We can get a few next time.” 

“Alright.” He looked into the sky toward the fading white cigar burn of the sun in the grayness. Then he set off back toward town and Sirius followed him. He had always followed Remus in the woods first because he didn’t know where he was going and later to stare at his ass and/or the soles of his bare feet and his calves and wrists and the small of his back and the nape of his neck where his hair was cut unevenly into a messy ducktail wedge and a few freckles followed the tan line at his collar like a constellation pointing elsewhere. Now he followed Remus because he had forgotten where he was going and because the woods were dark and cold and that witch was sweeping a chill up his back and the wind in the dead and rotting autumn layer behind him sounded like the footsteps of some secretive legion. Remus had come to drag the prosthetic slightly and when he turned his face even slightly toward Sirius he could see it was pinched with pain. 

“We shouldn’t’ve come so far if you’re hurting.” 

“Except we have to eat.” 

With that he could not argue. The garden at the house was overgrown and it seemed all the fields in Georgia had gone fallow and himself he had never been much of a forager and nearly everything that had passed his lips until he went to war Beulah had put in front of him on the table. 

“Have you got anything for the pain back at the lean-to?” 

“I had tincture of opium but I can’t bear the taste of it.” 

“I’ll take it then.” 

“No you won’t.” 

Remus was not a forceful person except for sometimes. His shoulders were tight under his worn white shirt. 

\--

In town they went to the grocer and traded the mushrooms with the woman there who asked Remus if he had known her son who was missing at Antietam. “I wasn’t there,” said Remus. “Have you got — is there any meat we could swap for.” 

She brought them a fair enough cut of venison and cut it a bit smaller when Sirius asked for collard greens to go with. Then with the rest of the mushrooms and the meat wrapped in butcher paper and the bouquet of greens tied with twine they stopped at the bunkhouse to collect all of Sirius’s remaining worldly belongings and then set off for the lean-to to pick up Remus’s things. It had begun raining but not so heavily and the distant thunder clattered like something falling far away. Whenever it rolled Remus looked to him nervously in a way that suggested he was trying to be surreptitious about it. 

Everything Remus owned was tucked behind an old rotting haybale in the lean-to wrapped up in to a woolen blanket. The smell of that place — the wet wood, the earth and the rain and the hay and the damp wool — and the sound of the wind trembled something and shook it up. Whatever was watching them from the woods remembered them from long ago and it watched how they didn’t dare touch each other and it was indicative of a divorced fragmenting wrongness. The same of course that was in everything. The same forcible division. The same secession, as if by crowbar. Remus was carrying all the food in his canvas bag so Sirius carried the bundle for him. It was so light Sirius felt hungry, holding it. It was the feeling of being hollow. Starving and otherwise. 

In the old days they had brought the mushrooms here and strung them up to dry and then pressed each other into the darkness. In the trees the wind was moving. When Remus laughed it shook everything. Now he walked just ahead of Sirius so rigidly with pain when they had not walked altogether too long a ways. He could take it no longer — it was the bittersweet wet rot smell of the rain — and he grabbed Remus by the wrist (he wavered, unsteady on the false leg) and leant in and kissed him. Very wet and sudden and shocked and with his mouth open and he felt the muscle tense in Remus’s forearm and Remus stayed very still until carefully with his heart slamming skips Sirius pulled away. 

“Is it alright?” 

Remus’s upper lip was slick obscenely and Sirius’s stomach turned over. His mouth was red and so sweet and there was a scar at the corner he remembered and a freckle past it below just near the jaw. 

“You can’t kiss me anymore,” said Remus and he turned into the forest. 

“Why’s that?” Sirius swallowed. Suddenly his head was pounding. “Have you got — a girl, or — ”

“I’ve got — I’m sick. You could catch it.” 

“Well I had the flu real bad in Chicago…” 

“This ain’t the fuckin flu,” he said, “Sirius, I don’t want to talk about it.” 

“Do you not — don’t you want to go with me anymore.” 

“It’s not that.” From Sirius’s sweaty grasp he loosed his wrist. “I still — it’s not that.” 

“Well then what is it?” 

Remus turned and looked through him and his eyes were big and pale and nervous and his hair was very dark from the rain with strands sticking and curling upon his forehead where his brow was tight. “Will you listen? I can’t get you sick. It’s contagious.” 

“You don’t look sick.” 

“Some people don’t.” 

“Well we’ve been breathing the same air all day — ”

“You don’t get — it isn’t like a cold. You can’t catch it that way. Don’t you understand?” It was almost funny how these days so much felt like throwing yourself again and again against a brick wall waiting for one or the other to shatter and of course the wall never did. No one would get it but someone else who had lived it. “Can we walk to your house,” said Remus, “please, I can hardly stand up.” 

\--

The house was damp and dark and rainwater streamed on the wallpaper contemplatively like the walls of a cave. Moss had started to spring around the molding and in corners mushrooms were spreading. On the ceiling black mold expanded in blushing grey gradient like a colorless rainy sunset. Together they descended on rickety stairs to the old kitchen where they were obliged to hold matches out for light until they found a gaslamp. 

Sirius bade Remus sit while he built the fire and stoked it and Remus cleaned the mushrooms gently on his shirt and chopped them gingerly as if concerned to cause them pain. In the golden light from the lamp on the table spreading and the licking searching flames of the cookfire against the ashen hearth Sirius saw the pink flash of Remus’s tongue press in concentration against his upper lip. Then he turned to the fire again. When he had good embers he put the grille in as he had seen the slaves do a thousand times in his youth while he hid from his parents in the kitchen and they had whispered and eyed him nervously. Then Remus came over with the venison in a cast iron pot with the mushrooms and a chunk of duck fat he had drawn from a jar in his own knapsack. 

“I could look for a bottle of wine,” Sirius said when he stood up. Remus was watching at the pot in the fire and his hair was still wet and he smelled like rain. He leaned heavily on the lintel to take his weight off the false knee. 

“I have whiskey,” he said. “With my things. Are you going to cook those greens?” 

Together they sat by the fire drinking from the bottle and smoking cigarettes — each their own because Remus would not share — while Sirius prepared the greens in more duck fat. In the camp they had circulated a horrific hooch moonshine brewed beneath someone’s cot in a stolen teapot. Batches in particular had been known to turn folk blind but occasionally one required a drink and there was no other option. They would have a nip before the gravedigging to keep warmth in their faces and hands and they would have several nips afterward to chase the thoughts away. 

“Did you all have whiskey on the front,” he asked Remus. They had been silent for too long and it itched. 

“Sometimes,” he said. He was looking into the fire and the flames were in his eyes like they made up some secret piece of his fragile soul. “The officers.” He passed the bottle carefully to Sirius. 

“You were always with that Lieutenant — the one you rode out with back when?” 

“Yes,” Remus said, “he died at Appomattox.” He put his hand out to receive the bottle again though Sirius hadn’t had a drink. 

“So it was under him you — ” He rather did not want to say it but Remus’s shoulders were very tight and his brow had furrowed and his dark eyes liquid in the gold light searched Sirius’s face. Like he was trying to hear and read again what had just been said. “Lost your leg,” Sirius finished. 

“Yes,” Remus told him, “Spotsylvania Courthouse.” 

“Yes, you said.” 

“The um — seventh day of fighting there out of I think fourteen.”

“Shot or —” 

“Cannonfire. We were behind a stone wall,” Remus said, staring into the fire, “and it rolled.” He passed back the whiskey without looking at Sirius. 

“Any other casualties?” 

“I don’t know. They brought me to — this field hospital down the road, in an old church. Then further on again to Charlottesville. I never saw any of em again. My battalion I mean. They might all have died by now. Many of em sure as hell would’ve bled grey if they were cut and they wouldn’t hardly relish coming back under Union sovereignty.” 

“Most of that ilk were hung for elopement at Camp Douglas.” 

“Right. Well better to die on the run some say.” 

“I thought about it,” Sirius told him. Already the whiskey had loosened his tongue up. “When it was worst. About running.” 

“Find me a single Confederate veteran who didn’t ever think about running,” Remus told him. Then he took the bottle gently from Sirius’s hands. “Your greens are ready.” 

\--

They ate together at the table ravenously, straight from the pot and the skillet with their hands like animals. “When was the last time you ate something so good,” Sirius asked. He was worrying under his fingernails with his teeth. 

Remus didn’t answer and only smiled. When he stood up he said “I can make soup tomorrow with the scraps and the bones. Didn’t Beulah have a garden out back?” 

“It’s rather hopeless now.” 

“Where do you think she is?” 

“She might’ve run off to Canada.” It was dearly wishful. He missed her and had been wishing since he left home for the war that he had listened with more than passing interest to her stories and her advice. “Do you remember hearing them all in the forest in the night.” 

“Yes,” Remus said, “I wanted to go with when I was younger. My father shot at em more than once.” 

“What happened to your father.” 

“Sherman. I expect.” He didn’t clarify. He stretched his back, which cracked. In the silence Sirius could hear the insects and rodents in the walls and the humming of the embers and Remus’s bones resettling like clay cracking in the sun. The tiny pinched wheeze in his breath and the oddness in the rhythm of his step. “There’s no carrots or anything in the garden?” Remus asked again. His voice was nervous. As if the lack of carrots in the garden symbolized a saltedness of this complete earth. Like nothing might ever grow back again anywhere South of the Mason-Dixon if there were no carrots in the garden. 

“There might be,” Sirius told him. “It ain’t been tended since — we can check in the morning.” 

They brought the gaslamp with them upstairs into the parlor and then up the wide illustrious staircase toward the family’s respective bedchambers careful on the weak steps and Remus stood close behind him. As though they wandered not into Sirius’s family home but rather into some haunted ghostship possessed by its mutineers. “Which room was yours,” Remus whispered. His voice was like another drop of water falling through the ceiling onto the carpet and the growing moss. Reclamation by woods. Finality and consumption. 

Sirius had not himself dared to open the door to his room or his brother’s as though he would find in there some shade of one or both of them watching ever out the window in search of something he was ashamed to have not yet found. He pointed it out to Remus as they passed. The bronze doorknob was tarnishing a lichen green like an ancient menhir marking a gravesite or a bend in the royal road. Remus turned the knob and Sirius heard the lock snick and looked back and the expression on his face must have been such that Remus pulled the door shut again. 

“What do you think’s become of your folks?” 

“Either they’re deceased or they’ve fled to South America,” Sirius told him. “Neither would particularly surprise me. I bet they left this place the minute the tide started turning.” 

“I never so much as saw their faces.” 

“You wouldn’t’ve liked them.” Sirius in fact had rarely seen their faces either; his father even less often than his mother and both only for punishment his nursemaids would not dole out. The great bed in their suite had gone nearly unslept-in in Sirius’s memory and the room was pale and strange and undecorated and now molding and bleached with sun and the wallpaper degrading in abstract artful form. The moon was coming in upon the floor through the burnt hole in the ceiling and the radial bridge of mushrooms in a corner were a strain Sirius did not recognize. 

“Have you been sleeping in their bed,” Remus said, not a question. He was whispering again as though he feared he would wake whatever nonexistent sleepers. This room alone felt unhaunted, Sirius thought but could not say, and there was a way out that wasn’t the door, and the night breeze was coming in with the stars and the foliage in the roof. 

“Only one night. Then I — it was too alone.” Unsaid: it was so alone it felt not alone at all. 

Remus was standing in the doorway with the gaslamp casting a golden ring around him onto the floor and into the darkness. Yellow with the white frost of moonlight like confectioner’s sugar. “We can’t sleep in the same bed together,” he said and his voice was soft and embarrassed and almost frightened. 

“You said it didn’t catch like the flu.” 

“It doesn’t,” Remus said, “I worry.” 

“I can keep my hands off you if you ask.” 

Remus chewed a nail off and spat it out. “I worry,” he said again. 

“I won’t — ”

“Stop — stop there. Please. Maybe we can talk about it some other time.” 

Of course they would never. It was twisting at Sirius’s gut. 

“Can I sleep in your room?” 

“Remus.” 

“It’s right — just down the hall and I’ll hear anything on the stairs.”

“They’re quiet stairs,” said Sirius bitterly. 

“I sleep lightly. Now, you know, after.” He chewed another fingernail off. “I’ll have a cigarette with you and then we can — well we can go our separate ways for the night.” 

Sirius agreed reluctantly but Remus would not even sit upon the bed with him to smoke and instead he sat on the windowsill restlessly tapping his foot until the cigarette had burned to a red ember and he flicked it into the night. He left the gaslight with Sirius, who watched as he felt his way down the hall. When Sirius heard the door rattle again he thought, distinctly, he’ll never come out of there again. He himself remembered sitting at that window in the night feeling the eyes of whatever witch in the forest beyond the garden searching his very soul for imperfections that were no doubt limitless. He blew out the gaslight and despite the light of the moon could not turn his back to the darkness. So he thought about Remus’s illness. 

If it couldn’t be caught like a cold but it could be caught through kissing and otherwise it was probably syphilis. Indeed it was a bad way. He could not help but wonder how Remus had gotten it to begin with. It was not quite that he was virtuous but he was very prudent. But then war snatched things like prudence from you like fruit from a tree. That animal urge to live would have you do funny things. Himself he had done enough in service of it that he did not like to recall in much detail. 

He wondered about it and as such did not sleep until dawn started pushing at the window like a visitor. 

\--

Of the camp he remembered chiefly the sickness and the cold. The hunger and the raw bleak bone-taste of the gruel they were fed to part assuage it. Sucking on a stone for water because the supply had frozen in the night. Sap froze in their firewood. He could not sleep for his teeth chattering and his fingers and toes were numb and white or even black for months on end and it seemed they had only just thawed when it began to get cold again. 

There was much waiting. He did not so much mind the labor. It was undifficult and honest and it felt just. Otherwise they sat and meditated on the immensity of their failure. Of their moral shortcomings and their grand betrayal and the enormity of their lost cause. In the winter many of them died impartially and they were dispatched to light smoky heatless bonfires over the frozen ground to melt it enough to dig six-foot graves for soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy alike. They died of pneumonia and tuberculosis and influenza and a few from hypothermia and a few from syphilis acquired before internment or conscription in the bordellos of New Orleans or elsewhere. They would grab the bodies by their cold ankles or their cold wrists. They were buried in what remained of their uniforms though they were torn and dirty and missing buttons and stripes and stained with the blood they had coughed up in their final distress. Then they would throw them in the pit. By the end of it night had fallen and they were too numb to summon gentleness with the corpses even if they were the vacated earthly manifestations of friends. Names and ranks and regiments were inscribed on simple wooden planks. Some among the soldiers were buried unknown for their papers had been lost or confiscated and there were none of their regiment left alive. 

They tried to warm themselves and could not. Sirius thought of John Franklin’s expedition lost in the Arctic in 1846. Certainly even that could not be so bad as this. Certainly the next step forthcoming was as John Rae had said and the English gentry had struck down — to boil one another’s bones in pots to eke out the last of the marrow. To bury one another in the ice. To leave a trail of relics like breadcrumbs strewn across the unending sheer white waste at the cap of the world. He dreamed he was lost there and woke believing it sick with vertigo in a squall of pure snow blown Southerly off the lake. He was brought to the infirmary with what they called snowblindness. Like he was a horse in a Western story driven mad by the refraction of the sun from the salt flats and requiring to be shot. He left two weeks later exhausted and emaciated from fever and influenza and the snow had not yet melted. He thought perhaps it was April. In another month they were marched to the frontier to break stones and cut trees. 

When he could summon the strength to draw the memory forth from the deep frozen recesses of his own mind he recalled chiefly one instance in his and Remus’s strange partnership. They had been together near the Lupins’ prized mushroom patch frontier-far into the silent loam, and at first it was nothing that hadn’t been before, and then suddenly it was vexed to nightmare. They were both breathless and the dark was coming and Remus had straddled him and his hair was wild and caught the dusk color through the tree canopy. This is only everything, he was thinking. This is all that is. He is all that is. And he was content with it, such as it was. Remus's cheeks were flushed red and he held Sirius by the shoulders with his long strange hands which kneaded like at bread with a hunger Sirius almost could not fathom. 

"You can," Remus had said; Sirius had not known what. "I want you to." 

He had not known. He wondered who had. Then he forgot all his wondering. Remus prepared himself with naught but their saliva which he cupped like ritual wine in his witch’s hand. He was so very lovely he was like a sculpture of a forgotten god buried in ashes. He breathed evenly and Sirius held his hips, mapping bones, starving suddenly, traced the lines with thumbs.

They were all of sixteen years old and Sirius understood whatever this was it would be as such forever. The war had begun already then to foment at Fort Sumter and in Richmond and he had heard whispers in the parlor room and at night he laid awake and wondered what would become of him in a years’ time or less but now it was only this. Their skin in the mushroom field — the raw yearning like a current native to the distant sea. Guiding him like a ghostship to some northwest passage that was not. Remus rocked his long body in the proffered cradle of hips. His inside like that of the very earth. Mineshaft to centerness. He made a sound in his throat and Sirius touched the small of his back where it had come to arch delicately — the bones like a volcanic line of distant sea islands — and he thought for just a single humiliating second he could taste tears in his jaw. 

In there a dead canary would tell you if you had come too near to Thanatos to be let out. There was no oxygen. Remus bent to kiss him and the shift was such that his mouth pressed dizzily to Sirius's cheek. His mumbling to God in a bizarre lyrical litany like the induction ceremony of backwoods cultists. Only this forever, he was thinking. In the West the sun was turning red as blood and he rocked up and Remus’s mouth dropped open. It was the sort of awe you would have at death or at the very beginning of life and later he mused it was almost both, or either. Inside himself everything was unraveling like an old sweater. He thought, this is where we all came from — from desire and from consummation. From passion and inheritance — from the myth and its inexorable cyclical fulfillment. 

When he did come it was like some dissolution of himself. He felt Remus's hand splayed on his chest and the warmth of his self smooth and wet as the red clay dug deep. As eternal and as primordial. When he came back to himself he flipped Remus onto his back in the loam and tasted him where he could at the narrowing of his hips at all the tender pale freckled skin where it was offered like ceremonial ambrosia. Sirius yearned for him. Every piece of him like its own sacred directive to be honored as was appropriate… 

He dreamed he came home to find everything entombed in ice. All the greenness frozen such that the heavy boughs of the trees snapped under the weight they bore. One endless concealing and swallowing white sarcophagus of snow. Beneath which nothing lived but the perpetuity of secrets. The red red earth awaiting some other. And it would wait as such as long as time was. When he had come down on the train from Chicago he watched out the window at this demon Listeneise, at the shifting green spread of the hills and the fertile valleys and suspected they had finally nearly arrived at some very final crossroads in the South where there was no longer a distinction between the within and the without. The war had made it all manifest spread out like honey or blood in the wet fields. Char upon char upon kudzu upon cotton where it had been made to show itself for what it was. The woods and the clay would take everything back one day and perhaps it was in very many years, but also perhaps it was tomorrow, and also perhaps it had come already, and no one had bothered to notice. 

\--

He woke past noon and knocked at his room’s door but there was no answer so he went outside. Remus was in the garden pulling weeds up. “There’s carrots,” he said when he saw Sirius in the door. He pointed into the fraying basket on the stoop that held them, multicolor and misshapen. “And I think — these are something.” 

“Parsnips,” Sirius remembered. His mouth was dry with sleep and his head felt light. 

“Right. And these are potatoes. It’s not so bad.” 

The warmth of the day had put color in his face and there was soil smudged up his arms and on one cheek and on his shirt and pants. So help him Sirius recalled the various and sundry occasions of their youthful explorations in the thick forest loam and something turned over in his stomach. In the afternoon thunderstorms the earth would turn almost liquid and they would press each other into it. The scrappy collage of sounds: the rain on the old leaves, catching in the canopy above. The thunder which rumbled first distantly and then cracked like a gunshot so close sometimes he thought he smelled sulfur. Remus’s heart slamming like a door and the staggering march of his own breath. How each time he thought he would drown in there and never come out. How desperately he had wanted to. They would lie together in the dirt and then they would walk to the creek and wash themselves and their clothes so they could tell their respective minders they had been caught in the storm. Beulah suspected, Sirius had always thought; she would purse her lips when she looked at him. “You’ll get yourself killed,” she said. “You’ll catch your death. Or the flash floods.” Or lightning, he thought, lying in bed at night; they could be smote by God, perhaps they deserved it. 

Now he knew if death indeed was catching he had caught it someplace else as had Remus. He went and sat on the edge of the garden in the dark, rich soil. It was thick and smooth and it smelled of rot and clay sweet and clammy and he dug his fingers into it and clenched it into a ball in his fist then watched it come apart again. Remus was watching him. “Did you sleep?” 

“No.” 

“I didn’t either.’ 

“It’s that room.” 

“We could drag the bed in — ”

“Remus, I don’t want that.” 

“Well you can’t have what you do want,” Remus said loudly. Sirius had never heard him raise his voice before. “You best get accustomed to what you can have.” 

“I just want — don’t you trust me?” 

Remus didn’t answer. He sat painfully to start in on a new patch of weeds. 

“If I ever did something — well you can trust me now. I wouldn’t go against your wishes. I just want — ” he lied — “your company. I just can’t bear to be alone here such as it is and I hate to see you living where you were.” 

Remus was pulling weeds so vengefully Sirius could hear the roots tearing from the ground. 

“I don’t want you to be afraid of me,” Sirius told him. 

“I’m not afraid of you.” 

“Then what is it.” 

He stopped and sat back. “Myself. My head.” 

“What’s wrong with your head?” 

“You ever find you get — mixed up with time and you don’t remember — ” He squeezed the bridge of his nose between two fingers leaving a dirty thumbprint under one eye. “Where you are,” he said softly, “or how you got there or who — ”

Sirius waited, heart thundering, but Remus went no further. So eventually he said, “Yes. It’s battle fatigue they told me. It goes away.” 

“Ain’t neither of us seen battle for years now and it ain’t gone away and so I wonder. And also I wonder cause it ain’t battle either of us is fatigued of.” 

“It ain’t?” Sirius asked quietly, but Remus had started pulling weeds again. “I’m not afraid of you,” he said a little louder. “Not you nor your head.” 

“Well you should be.” 

“You can’t tell me how to feel or not. Plus I think my head is worse.” 

“Is it really.” 

“I don’t know unless you talk to me. Isn’t that — I want to be in this with you.” 

“No you don’t,” said Remus. He sat back again and his eyes were so sad. “Sirius, no you don’t.” 

“Why did you come looking for me if you didn’t want to talk to me about a single thing.” He hated the rush of victory he felt when Remus looked back down into the overturned soil without answering. “Can’t we help each other?” 

“You can’t — ”

“Don’t fucking say that. There has to be a way.” 

“A way to what,” Remus asked. His voice was flat. He was carefully picking through the upturned soil in search of seedlings. 

“To feel — I don’t know. Just to close my eyes at night.” 

“Perhaps like a tandem exorcism.” 

Sirius laughed. Remus looked up at that just for a second with a tentative smile in his eyes reflected nowhere else on his face. “We can try it that way if you want.” 

“I was never much one for Christian dogma.” 

“I just want to be able to sleep,” Sirius told him. “Will you help me.” 

“Yes,” said Remus. The breeze from the forest stirred his hair and it carried the heady ghost of rain and rot and soil. “Of course.” 

“You have to let me help you to make it fair.” 

He knew this would get Remus. He had always been concerned with fairness. Across the garden he was running his fingers gently through the soil to make furrows. “You can try,” he said at last. 

\--

They went again into the forest to pick mushrooms and brought them to town to barter for seeds. The proprietress let them have a few packets on trade and the rest on credit which Remus figured for two more bags of mushrooms. “We won’t have meat for a while unless we catch it ourselves,” said Remus as they walked back to the plantation house. They were obliged to go slowly as they had walked for hours that morning and Remus’s limp was pronounced and his face ashen. “I don’t have a gun anymore, have you?” 

Sirius did — his army-issue pistol had been given back to him upon his release from Camp Douglas — but he had not so much as touched it or removed it from its oiled canvas wrapping. In a fit of pique not long after his conscription he had carved Remus’s initials into the barrel though he had told James they stood for Rhea Jane Lanier. He did not think he could bear to hold it let alone shoot it. With it he had killed perhaps twenty men. “I can look for mine,” he told Remus. “I never was much of a hunter.” 

His brow creased. In fact Sirius had been very good at hunting of a different kind and this they both understood. “Right.” 

At the house the afternoon rain was threatening and they worked quickly to plant the seeds to let them get a first watering. Remus’s leg hurt so he didn’t speak much. He was chewing his lip tightly between his teeth. He directed Sirius, who had never planted seeds before in his life nor even watched the slaves at the work for even that his parents (and the rest of Confederate polite society) had considered labor too valueless to be conducted by the scion of Macon’s oldest money, by pointing his long white crooked finger intently where necessary. The seeds in his fingers were smooth and pale of variant sizes and he pressed them into the soil watching how Remus did it, bedding them down between the furrows with a careful attention like an artist or a parent putting a child to sleep. He watched Remus construct volcanic mounds of soil he pressed a thumbprint into before he dropped the larger squash seeds inside; it seemed like an archaic ritual. 

“Did you and your father have a garden,” he asked. 

Remus nodded. “Out back of the house.” His voice was brittle and sharp with pain. He eyed the clouds. “Can you get the runner beans down?” 

“Sure. Just tell me where.” 

Remus sat heavily and stretched his leg out. “Furrow on the edge so we can put them up against the fence.” 

“Fence?” 

“We ought to build one. Not right yet but. Might there be chickenwire someplace in your house?” 

He still struggled to conceptualize it as his house, though now that it was disintegrating he supposed it was. “I don’t know. I was never — privy to that sort of thing.” 

“There’s some at mine. We can go by tomorrow.” 

He thought he should apologize for being so useless. For feeling from time to time drunken with sleeplessness and for knowing — for being able to recite Shakespeare and John Donne from memory and knowing how to construct a sonnet but not knowing how to plant seeds. For knowing times tables and geometry and a rough sketch of biology and physics as deemed appropriate by his tutor who had been deeply religious, but not knowing how to cook, nor how to heal wounds, nor how to brew the tea Beulah had made for him when he was sick, when his bones ached with fever, when he had broken his ankle in a fox’s den when he was seven. Knowing European geography but having no grasp of the forest beyond the pathways he had walked with Remus. Having learned to kill and having squandered nearly everything else. 

He got the runner beans in. Across the garden Remus was watching him. The crease of pain was disappearing from his brow now that he had stretched his leg out some. The clay in the soil felt like a mask upon his hands sticking wet in the creases and turning grey. He stood and then he went and helped Remus up. “Are you alright?” Remus asked him. 

“Yes. Are you?” 

Standing again his face had once more drained of any color but grey. “Not so much.” 

“Beulah used to make tea when I was hurt but I don’t remember it,” Sirius said. His voice was quick and hot with tears he quickly swallowed. “I’m sorry.” 

“If I take it off and lie down it’ll be alright. Don’t — it’s not your fault.” 

He helped Remus upstairs step by step very slowly into the great room and helped him sit upon the bare horsehair mattress stained with rain and char through the false flue in the roof. Remus was breathing so close to him — and hard through his nose with pain — that it stirred his own hair against his cheek. There was a dark clay-y handprint against Remus’s shirt where Sirius had supported him on the stairs. Remus met his eyes for just a moment and outside very far away he heard thunder. Already he could smell the rain very close in the breeze through the hole in the roof. “Go sit,” Remus said softly. When Sirius tried he said “Not on the bed. Go sit in the windowsill.” 

He obliged Remus and then watched as he undid his shoes and belt and then half-stood against the floorboards to take off his worn and filthy blue jeans. Sirius almost didn’t dare to breathe. He had seen prosthetics before but it was different to see one worn. It, the leg thing, was an artful construction of polished wood and hammered iron like the instrument of some artisan or metalworker and it was shapely as its fellow around the calf and ankle and it was attached to Remus's thigh by means of a few cured leather straps that belted tightly against the skin. The strands were fastened securely and had been for so long that they had left semi-permanent pressure marks where the blood had been forced away and none of the soft pale hair that grew elsewhere on Remus's legs would grow there. 

"Can you take it off," Sirius asked. The back of his throat was dry and he felt as though speaking too loudly might shatter something fragile spinning between them like a single strand of thread. Remus watched him for a moment and in the soft light in the room his mouth was very red. Then he leant forward and undid the straps one by one sliding the leather through each buckle with a dry hiss and it came off heavy in his hands and he placed it gently on the floor with a thunk like the footstep of a ghost. The wound was neat and practiced and the skin folded and sewn clean and even as pastry and the blood was coming back to it with a sunset flush. Sirius looked back up at Remus's face as he pulled his shirt over his head. His hands were dry and grey with soil and he was freckling with sun on his face and neck and forearms but the skin of his chest and belly was pale and lovely like fresh milk spilt. "Christ," said Sirius without meaning to. 

"I know it's horrible."

"It's not. You're something to look at." 

Remus's mouth twisted. "I forgot about your flattery." 

He knew now he was treading somewhere delicate. "I always meant it." 

"I know," said Remus. There was some yearning thing in his eyes Sirius had always taken a strange pleasure in putting there and it was a yearning as thick as the spring forest for a thousand things that could not be named or satisfied. And others that could but they had endeavored not to out of fear or otherwise. "I know it. More than anything else." 

"Can I kiss you?"

"No."

"Why not."

"I told you why." 

"I'm not afraid — " 

"It don't matter how afraid you ain't cause I won't let you." He looked about as sincere as Sirius had ever seen him and as certain of anything. "I won't. I'll never forgive myself." 

"Well we can just be together and not touch at all." 

"God. You're relentless." 

"Everyone I ever fought under said that more than once." He watched Remus stop the smile spreading on his face before it reached his mouth. "You can't tell me you don't want - it's been five years." 

"You don't know how bad. I swear. But we can't." His voice was breath. "God, we can't. I wish." 

"We can. We can just be careful. Will you let me?" 

Stillness broken by birdsong. Petrichor through the shattered glass. On the great plain below Chicago scoured by the wind off the lakes he had yearned above all for the summer rain and the crack of thunderstorms each afternoon brooding and seething in the hills like something hungry towering until they burst under the weight of themselves. For the smell of the forest and the wet loam, mushrooms, carrion, animals who had laid themselves to die in their own wild mausoleum and whose bones grew things off from themselves like proffered ceremonials. In the night on occasion when he wandered too late the flash of lanterns like willo-the-whisps or widows' ghosts and the false birdcalls of slaves escaping the plantations southerly and following their secret railroad through the forest by the dipper and the North Star. And even now he understood, even if it was all still here also it was all gone. 

By way of his answer Remus lay carefully back in the bed upon the bare horsehair mattress. The light came through it onto his smooth pale belly where there were a few scattered birthmarks and scars and his ribs expanded under the delicate skin like bellows and Sirius went to him as he often had in his dreaming and in the distant fragmenting memory as if drawn there by the force that pulled the moon around the world. "You're so," said Sirius. The words dried up in his mouth and yet again he tried though his head was feeling lighter and lighter. "God. You're so — " 

"We can't touch," Remus reminded him. "We can't touch each other." 

"I know." 

"Do you?" 

"Remus, I know." 

"It's just I won't ever — " 

"Remus." He hovered so close their noses nearly touched. "I know." Then he knelt back again. His hand was inside Remus's thigh where his skin was warm and he could feel the pulse. He moved it to the other leg as though he would touch some unearthed reliquary and when he did he felt Remus tense. He was hard in his faded red breeches and Sirius could smell it. Sweat, and his desperation. He touched nervously the braided shell of the wound where the skin had been pulled over the lack and patched shut. "Remus," he said again. 

"It doesn't hurt." 

He could feel the heartbeat in it like a bird's wings. When he cupped it entire in his palm he felt Remus gasp like a strike of matchflare. His eyelids fluttered and the small of his back was a tiny arch. "Alright?"

"I said it didn't hurt." 

It was not the wound of which he asked and Remus knew it but that was the last they spoke on the subject. Sirius passed two fingers up along the vein running blue in Remus's thigh until Remus grabbed him by the wrist. "No further." 

"Alright." 

He undressed and Remus watched him with his own hand resting on his belly just at the waist of his breeches with the smallest finger just beneath the waistband and he looked like some bemartyred saint awaiting his final possession by God. The light through the hole in the ceiling changed and he felt upon his spine the first touch of rain. "This is the purest — Sirius, the purest torture," Remus said. 

"What is." 

"That you can't touch me." 

"You can touch yourself," said Sirius, "can't you?" 

Still the air was changing and he heard another closer rumble of the sacred afternoon thunder like some pagan benediction. Remus opened his mouth just so as if finally understanding and he lifted his hips and folded his knee into his chest to get the red breeches off and he cast them to the floor. "Arms length," he said, but he sounded woozy. "There." 

Sirius shifted away in the huge bed and braced his wrist not far from the wild vibrant spill of Remus's hair upon the ragged pillows. "Alright?" he said again.

"Yes. I'll tell you if it's not. Are you alright?" 

"I wish I was inside you." 

He watched Remus's fingers tighten around himself. "I — I wish that too." 

"You could touch yourself there if you wanted." 

His eyes were huge in his face and the rain constellated wet drops across his belly magnifying the dark freckles and the pockmarks of the old sores. "I — not this — not this time. Okay?" 

"Okay." 

The first clasp of his cold hand around himself was like a strike of sudden lightning and he had to breathe very hard to keep from coming embarrassingly immediately as if to prove to Remus he had indeed grown up in this stupid way since they were very young fucking in the woods like refugees not of death's jaws but of Arcadia where the devil also was, though they did not know it then. In those days they had been alone there together and if the world revolved elsewhere they had ignored it until it was very necessary. "Okay," he said again, "okay." 

The rain made a sound on his skin sliding down his back like a phantom touch and it smelled the richest sweetest smell of heat and loam and stale woodfire and charred cotton and Remus said his name desperately like a man drowning. He finished first and then Sirius did, watching him, his red mouth open and his eyes just closed and the sound he made like a lost bird, and then they lay breathing together in the bed like real lovers. He buried his face in Remus's hair on the pillow and inhaled deeply and for a moment he thought he might weep, for everything that they had both lost and everything that had been returned, but instead he fell asleep. 

\--

Burnt caramel that stuck in his teeth. The crust of a loaf of rye bread tearing sharp against the roof of his mouth. He wore the uniform as it had existed in the camp — grey pants and coat. Hand-knit gloves and hat overlarge and crooked and fraying full of holes. Wool sweater worn at the elbows and pulling apart at the hem where it rubbed against his belt. He walked in the winter woods which were wet and cold and thin with the trees carefully as though he stalked an animal for there was a thin rime of frost upon the leaves. He sought something but was not sure exactly what and as such he was nervous and he walked slowly. 

It felt rather like hunting as there had not been much fighting like Indians did in the trees and rather they faced each other upon the bridges and the plains ducking in behind farmers' fences and sheds together until they were blown apart by the enemy's artillery. Once or twice they had crept by stealth around the Union encampments for one task or another and in that moment as in this one they sought the darkest shadows in the woods and pretended they fought Metacom or Kancamagus in the ancient colonial wars or that they were settlers at Roanoke fleeing to the mountains. 

Beside him there was a crunch and he turned carefully as he would not have in life now that his flight response was so painfully sharpened and beside him was James. Who held a finger to his lips and then made the sign for a flank. In his free hand he held the Remington rifle he had inherited from his father, who had fought the Spanish in Mexico. 

Logically he knew he was dreaming. James had died in the camp and he remembered the very liquid crux of the moment when his bloody breathing stilled and silenced. But it felt real; the air smelled of woodsmoke and it was brittle with snow. 

James ran bent at the waist holding his rifle in both hands neatly and practicedly at the balance point and Sirius followed him. He was not altogether sure where they were going as he had rarely been at war. When they ducked in behind a fallen tree having pulled up a blind of soil in its unearthed network of roots Sirius chanced a look about for others of their battalion but they were absent. “What’s the — ” 

James held his finger to his lips again, and he peeked around the torn-up roots. Snowflakes constellated delicately in his wild hair as they later would the day Sirius buried him. He turned to Sirius again and indicated with a toss of his head someplace to look. The clearing, he mouthed. 

Sirius peered around the roots of the tree. He could feel the thick sandy soil leached by years pressing up through his gloves. Past the blind where they’d laid in indeed there was a clearing and in it was a Confederate officer’s tent of pristine canvas sloping in with the weight of snow. First he heard no sound from it, then laughter. From inside golden light spilled out onto the frozen ground and he saw against the canvas the shadows of the cots and the tables where the officers would plot strategy with ancient vellum maps. 

“Who’s laid in out here?” he asked James, who shrugged. He held a finger to his lips again. 

Somewhere there were dogs howling. First it was far away then it was very close. He recalled riding with his father on a fox hunt. In the trees he sought the horses and almost stood to seek them but James pulled him back down by the hem of his coat. 

The dogs — they yapped and snarled and howled and whined and they were very near, but they could not be seen. Sirius peeked around the blind of roots again and in the light inside the officer’s tent throwing shadows he saw them. No longer were they human inside. They were ten or fifteen all shadow and some of them too big to be dogs or even to be wolves and their teeth sharp and differentiated enough to be seen from afar and their tongues lolling and their hunger in his own gut and their salivation in his own mouth. 

Then he heard a person cry out. A single bitter broken sound like steel scraping bone. He understood who it was without thought and he drew his gun (nevermind there were but six bullets) and threw himself out from behind the blind and ran toward the clearing. It never got much nearer but the sound got louder even amidst the vengeful competitive scrapping of the beasts were the ragged and raw cries of pain eventually indistinguishable from the sounds of the animals. 

Inside the tent they howled and barked and snarled. By the time he had reached the edge of the clearing there was no more human sound from the tent. He took a step regardless into the wide fairy-ring circle of it and it was then that James grasped him tightly around the chest. 

“James — ”

“He’s gone,” said James’s voice in his ear. The arms around him were as very thin as they had been at the end, the wrists so narrow above the uniform sleeves and the skin so like paper (thin and sheer) that all the differentiation of bones and veins was sculpturally prominent. Then in a blink the skin went away entire and the bloody bones alone held him. 

He pulled at them but they would not let him go. Inside the tent he heard a gurgling breathy sob, pure finality, like someone shot through the lungs… In nearly realized triumph the creatures were howling. 

“Sirius,” James said in his ear. His voice was snatched wind. He heard skin — muscle and bone tearing. This sound familiar from — 

He screamed something he later realized must have been Remus’s name. Then a sharp and very close crack — 

Sirius woke up in the big bed looking up at Remus and beyond him the hole in the roof and the moon which caught like the dream’s frost in his wild hair. Remus who had struck him across the face to wake him up; his cheek and jaw were tingling. “Sorry,” Remus said very softly. His eyes were wet. “You were — you were dreaming.” 

He was drenched in sweat he could feel through his hair and he had been weeping. The sound and the taste of it was still in his throat. “What happened,” Remus asked. He was nervous to hear; his voice was hardly sound but laced with dread like a drop of cyanide.

“You were,” he tried, sound shattered. “You — dogs. In an officer’s tent in a clearing and James — ” 

“Who’s James?” 

“Was. I buried him — at Douglas, February, February 7 1864.” 

Remus was stroking his hair back from his face where it had stuck across his nose and cheek and under his eyes and chin with sweat. 

“I watched him,” Sirius tried. “He just — only bones. And you — and I couldn’t — ” 

“You were dreaming,” Remus said again, but his voice was thick with tears. “You were dreaming — it was just a dream.” 

Not just, Sirius wanted to tell him. Very close beside him Remus lay down. There was a trace of dampness in the crepuscular sleepless half-circle under his eye. He reached for Sirius’s far shoulder; he felt so boneless with fear and grief that he went where Remus moved him, which was into his arms. 

For a long time he wept and Remus held him tightly and their skin was pressed together such that Sirius could feel the muscles and the bones in Remus’s back jumping as he tried to keep himself from crying, and against his leg the strange folded shell of the wound. He wept for that and for any number of other things lost. Chiefly for reality less malleable. For dreams that were only dreams. 

\--

They woke around the same time just before noon and Sirius watched from the bed as Remus carefully strapped his prosthetic back on. Then they went down to the kitchen and made drop biscuits they ate in the moldy wicker chairs on the collapsing front porch with the soup Remus had made the day before (venison scraps and carrots and potatoes) and they did not speak much.

“I have something to give you,” Remus said at last. He took his wallet out from his back pocket and rifled through the papers inside and after a few moments he found one he presented to Sirius. In the paper Sirius could see the tremor in his hand. It was a thin vellum envelope sealed with red wax and and so sheer Sirius could see through it the reverse ghost of Remus’s unschooled handwriting. On the front it was addressed simply to one Mr. Sirius O. Black of Macon Georgia. 

“What’s this.” 

“I wrote it to you to be delivered in the event of my death which didn’t — ”

Sirius waited for more but it was unforthcoming. With his thumbnail he broke the wax seal and drew forth the letter, which he carefully unfolded and read over thrice:

 

S, 

I write this to you by candlelight from far North Virginia on what is like to be the eve of my death. 

I rather did not want it to be this way at all but there is no alternative I can see because I do not recognize myself and I fear if you saw me now you would not recognize me either. I feel twisted and raw and wrong in my body and my soul like every scrap of me is rotting from inside and I cannot bear it. The doctor told me after this it will only be worse. I wish I could tell you but I cannot even think the words for the shame and I cannot — I can feel them inside my mind like very sick rainclouds. Like corpses —bloated on the battlefield after very many days such does death outpace the mortuary cart. I know now I am already dead inside myself. Perhaps you know the feeling. Such is war they tell me. I drag myself through this and every day and I am unseeing because I know what is coming and I am haunted. All the stories you used to tell me that Beulah told you and I could tell they frightened you because your heartbeat would speed up. I guess I was never afraid but I should have been because I know now evil resides upon this earth and and I can feel evil still inside me. She talked about the devil and now I have seen him. I suppose if you let him in once he will never let you go. I should have had some credence for her or the preacher or even my father but I was young and I had credence only for you if I am honest with myself. And I do not regret it because I am happy to have known you in my life and to have felt for too short a time that someone cared for me and for that I thank you and I will always treasure you in my heart. 

I hope you can recall how I was on the day I left Macon if it suits you to recall me at all. I wish beyond anything that I could see you again but as it cannot be instead I wish you will survive this war and live a long and happy life and I will be thinking of you and wishing you well if there is an after world, even from hell, which is where doubtless I am headed. 

Yours sincerely

Pvt. R Lupin

Spotsylvania Courthouse Virginia

May 14 1864

 

Carefully Sirius folded the letter and put it back in the envelope and pressed his thumb against the red wax seal as though just touching it would close it again. “Is it quite as bleak as I remember,” said Remus from his rocking chair. 

“You sound like — like Ichabod Crane. Like there was some beast chasing you.” 

“Well,” Remus said. “There was.” 

“I would recognize you no matter how bad you thought you were.” 

“Don’t be so certain.” 

He watched Remus roll a cigarette. And he watched the way the leg of the faded jeans he wore, hems uncuffing sloppily, fell hollowly over the apparatus where his calf should be. Had once been. His lithe young body that belied strength, for in the summers he walked perhaps ten miles every day. 

“Won’t you tell me what happened,” he said carefully. 

“I told you,” Remus said. “At least part of it. We laid in behind an old stone wall and after a while a ball came through it. But I could have moved — could have missed it if I had wanted to.” 

“It took your leg off.” 

“Clean off. I never seen — all that blood. It was a near thing. Lucky or unlucky depending there was a kid in my battalion whose father was a doctor out of Charleston and he made — a tourniquet with this scrap of lace. Gifted to him by his sweet little girl. He had her picture with him in a fuckin locket with a tiny piece of her hair.” 

It was so still the smoke from his cigarette seemed to swarm behind his head like gnats, or like a thundercloud. With his pale nervous eyes he was trying to dare Sirius to ask him something else. So he did. “What was that thing then? The devil I think you said — chasing you…” 

“It was the devil,” said Remus, “like I said.” He pressed the cigarette out carefully with the toe of his false foot. 

“Remus.” He looked up for just a moment and then back across the creased wagonroad into the forest. “The devil ain’t called the devil when he walks upon this earth.” 

“He doesn’t any longer. He died at Appomattox.” So it was the lieutenant. Sirius tried to remember the face in the town square now a lifetime ago and found with an abstract horror that he could not. “It ain’t nearly as bad — he didn’t hold a gun to my head. At least in the beginning.” 

“And he made you sick.” 

“Yes — Sirius, I can’t speak about this any more.” 

“Why not.” 

“I never have before. And it feels like turning inside out.” 

“I told you I was in this,” Sirius said. “I told you I was in it and I meant it. Your guts and all. Every bit of shit I am in for. Don’t you trust me?”

Remus swallowed and for a moment covered his mouth with his hand as if to keep himself from vomiting. Then he took it away again and clenched it tightly into a fist. When he turned to Sirius again his whole face had a feralness in it that might have frightened Sirius had he not been to war. Had he not seen over and over and even from himself what men could revert to in the extremity of their emotion. “You won’t ever — you won’t come near me again. And I won’t blame you. You should lock me in a shed in the backyard.” 

“You think I didn’t do terrible things because I felt I had to?” 

“God,” Remus said, “stop that.” 

“Stop what?” 

“Don’t make any — not even any tiny piece of it about you, I can’t stand it.” 

“I’m trying to — ”

“I know you are.” His face was flushed and the light caught the dampness in his eyes and upon his smooth ruddy cheek with the old pockmark beneath the eye and the scattered freckles. “You think you wanna know but I’m telling you that you don’t. Just like I don’t want to know how many men you think you killed.” 

“Seventeen,” Sirius said. “Seventeen I saw for certain. A few more as you say I inferred.” 

“I beat you by a bloody long shot.” 

“Lest you forget I was in a camp half the war.” 

Remus carefully took his cigarette stuff from his shirtpocket again and rolled himself another. And in the silence Sirius listened to the sounds from the forest. Sometimes he thought he heard someone far away playing a guitar. Finally Remus said, “He was like — you know how out West the Indians run buffalo off a cliff.” 

“I didn’t know that.” 

“Well they do. They round em up and chase em and they herd em til they — ” He mimed the long fall with the fingers that pinched the cigarette. “The thing is. I didn’t realize at all he was rounding me up and when he was chasing me I didn’t — ” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I’m telling you Sirius I didn’t mind it. I didn’t mind any of the herding either. I didn’t mind — fuck. I didn’t mind none of it. I didn’t notice nothin was wrong until I was practically halfway through falling.” 

Sirius let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Indeed it was rather less bad than he’d expected it to be. “Well it ain’t your fault.” 

“I can’t see how it ain’t.” 

“He cheated — he conned you. Like you say. It ain’t the buffalo’s fault they run off the cliff.” 

“They’re too fuckin stupid to see the conceit of it as was I.” 

“What are you supposed to — go around thinking there’s a Union legion waiting for you around every corner with guns drawn.” 

“That’s what you fuckin do.” 

“Cause I’m losing — I’ve lost my goddamn fucking mind is why I do that.” He reached across the static space between them for Remus’s cigarette forgetting for a strange blissful second that Remus refused to share. He tried to put his hand on Remus’s leg but he couldn’t quite reach. For a moment he could rest his index finger on the kneecap but then it slipped off. “I’ll tell you it’s not all that different than — well I kept thinking war would show me something about who I was. Like it was what I wanted and like it wanted me. But really I just got sick in my head and I feel like I rolled in ash like a fucking pig in shit. And now it won’t come off no matter what I do. So we all got conned; do you see it? This whole big — from Sumter to the end of it. It weren’t nothing to do with either of us. We were boys.” 

“What are we now.” 

“I don’t know.” It was like he’d set something loose inside himself. Not the scared animal but some other. “I don’t know what this is or what happened to me — to myself. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never been here before.” 

“You were raised in this house.” 

“I wasn’t. This me wasn’t. Do you see? Sometimes I remember something like a piece but like you remember a dream. Like I remember everything — ” He passed his hand between them disturbing the still smoke. “It’s in pieces and it’s falling apart in my head. When I remember it it’s like it happened to someone else.” 

Remus had hung his head to hide his eyes were wet again but he nodded. 

“Like I could never have been so happy in this life. This me who did all those things. Like I could never have touched you with these same hands.” 

“Well you can’t anymore,” said Remus lightly, but his voice was choked. 

“I can just sit near you and it helps. You’re like a — like a locket. I guess.” 

“Like a piece of — ”

“You have most of the good things that ever happened to me closed up inside you and even if I can’t see them I know they’re there. So I wish you wouldn’t say you feel like — what did you call it. Like a corpse on the inside.” 

“He’s in all my blood and I can’t get it out,” Remus told him. “It feels like ants crawling. And — you know it won’t be like this for long. You could wake up one morning and I’d be dead. Or crazy. Or disfigured like — like a creature.” He was watching down the road so intently Sirius first thought he might’ve seen a wagon or a traveller and as such he turned. The clouds were in the valley and the fog in the hills. “I ruined myself for you,” Remus said while his back was turned. 

“You don’t exist just for me.” His vision had started blurring and with the cleanish hem of his shirt he pressed the tears from his eyes. Remus wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t mind — I mean, last night —”

“You woke up screaming. I can’t — I can’t help you because it’s not really me like I was.” 

“I won’t be — neither talked in a circle nor convinced to leave you,” Sirius told him. When he stood it was so warm already that the humidity turned his vision black. “We should go pick some mushrooms.” 

\--

Together they walked again into the forest and Sirius watched the birthmark on the back of Remus’s neck. He had pressed his lips so tightly together they had lost all color. In the silence between them Sirius listened to the birdsong, and to the wind in the trees and the skittering of the animals in the brush. To Remus’s ponderous breathing and the varying percussive sounds his real foot and his false made in the thick loam. They took a route they had not before, deeper into the forest, to a few patches with varietals they had not yet cut. “McKinnons used to like these,” Remus said, indicating a cluster of yellow Chanterelles in the shadow of a Loblolly pine. 

“What happened to them?” 

“I don’t know. Marlene was married off to — I don’t remember, some Richmond bigwig.” 

Sirius cut a few and passed them up to Remus who tucked them gently in his canvas bag. “Cut a few of those ones too,” Remus instructed. “Those little ones.” 

They were tiny and capped with round domes and bruised a dark blue up their spines like flesh and they grew tucked up against the trunk of the tree as though they hid there in cluster like a school of fish. “What are these?” 

“The dreamy ones. The Indian witch ones; don’t you remember?” 

Sirius inspected them in his hand; the velvet violet body and the gills inside the cap. “Not that they looked like this.” 

“They change color when they bruise. You and I took them — it was August. Down by the river.” 

“I remember,” Sirius told him. “I saw you turn into a wolf.” 

Remus half-smiled which showed a sharp tooth. Sirius tried to pass the mushrooms up to him but he wouldn’t take them. “Put them in your pockets so we don’t trade on them by mistake.” 

It felt like carrying a secret or like a memory made nearly whole — made bruised flesh. At war when they had camped in the woods he had occasionally looked for them mostly to impress his compatriots namely James who claimed to have once licked a toad and envisioned a gateway to hell in his family’s root cellar but he had been afraid to cut his own to eat for fear he would pick deaths’ caps or worse. He feared even trying some for suicide, in the scant spread of days where he had considered it — the spreading endless days in the camp after James had died in which he felt like a character in an Attic tragedy bereft of gods as he was bereft of all else. 

They picked porcini in a stand of spruce and then walked on to a copse where trees had fallen in a thunderstorm to cut bay boletes. When they had filled the bag they walked to town again stopping a few times along the way to cut ramsheads. Remus could pick them out of the loam at a thousand yards it sometimes seemed and occasionally even when he pointed them out Sirius couldn’t see them until he indicated them with his boot. In the thick breathing woods they walked so close together their shoulders sometimes touched. The light dappled through the canopy moved across Remus’s skin like a wash of gold. Sirius thought about the night before. The moon on his skin and the shadow. Honey and blood…

In town they bartered the mushrooms. Half would go toward the credit for the seeds purchased the day previous and the other half covered a bit of oxtail that would hardly feed them both and yet would have to be enough for they both refused to touch Sirius’s gun, which he had hidden under one of the molding couch cushions in the parlor room he had generally avoided all his life. They walked back to the house as the afternoon thunderstorm began gathering in the West hills and Remus leaned heavily against him on the silent vacant road because it seemed no one dared come nor go from Macon in days strung so tightly. Sirius wondered what next city lay along the red dirt highway cut corduroy with wagontracks, war; he had never traveled South very far past his family’s home. He did not think he dared to. 

They sat on the porch as they had that morning and ate the mushrooms from Sirius’s pocket and smoked cigarettes waiting for it to hit. He recalled the first he had tried them he had thrown up for about twenty minutes whilst Remus rubbed his back in a strange seeming code of movements, heavy passes of his palms and fingers along the ridges and the hollows of Sirius’s bones like the conductor of an orchestra. Then the nausea had passed and he had watched for what seemed like hours at the ripples on the river in the echoing shallows. At Remus’s feet and how his smallest toe tucked beneath the others like a runt piglet. As if he had foreseen someday there would be only one. 

The wind was coming in; the smoke moved. Remus was watching something above Sirius’s head at the molding of the collapsing porch roof which was lacelike and fraying like the gazebo in some disgraced family plot. He reached forward and pressed his cigarette hand to Sirius’s knee until a burnt round of ash fell from it and smeared against his jeans. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing.” 

His eyes seemed like they were two different colors. One was blue and one was gray. They were walking beside each other in the frozen woods. Remus was holding James’s father's gun. They came across their own corpses hung at a makeshift gallows. Then they moved on again. He fell to his knees in the red earth which was Remus’s blood. He dug his hands into it and it was warm at the center spreading outwardly into his own self. He could feel the sickness in it as a kind of thread of nausea seeping out — a cloth wringing — from memory not his own. Yet still he could taste it on the back of his tongue. He dug a grave in it for hours but it filled itself back in. Finally he lay down and buried himself. The weight of the earth was everything that had ever died, and it was Remus pressing him down by the shoulders. Remus walking before him in the frost upon the loam. The birthmark at the back of his neck just visible beneath his uniform collar. They came across Sirius’s brother and the lieutenant hung together at a crossroads with their faces bloating purple in the wash of dusk color. In the woods beyond were Lincoln and Davis in full cartoonish regalia both crucified and their bare skeletal feet clustered about by mourners of every stripe who collected blood in holy chalices. 

Beulah was standing by a grave she had dug. In the red fallow fields at the Lestranges’ plantation in Newnan where they put their slaves who misbehaved underground in boxes for days on end. “Get in it,” she said. Same as she would have told him to mind his manners. She clasped Sirius by the shoulder. “Go on ahead honey and get in it.” When he did he found them running in the darkness. Clambering in the woods a cacophony of gunshots. The sulfur burst like sparks from a smokestack. He ducked in behind the pulled-up root blind with James whose skin was stretched upon his face unartfully like canvas over bone. “Flank around to the North.” He made the symbol with his hands. The snow blew into his eyes and stuck and he wandered in circles. His shovel against the ground might as well have been against stone and behind him he felt the strange watching presence of the week’s corpses in a pile and together they dragged the frozen firewood into a cairnlike stack and poured hooch on it until it would catch fire. 

“What’s wrong,” said Remus, behind him; he was naked except he wore a buffalo skin, like Indians he had seen in photographs. 

“Nothing.” 

Now they were walking down the Southern road from Macon proper toward Sirius’s family home except his uniform was blue, and they were singing John Brown’s Body. Drums cracking wild as fireworks. Remus was behind him with a torch whose heat he could feel against the back of his neck. 

It was a pleasure to burn it, the house, though he knew he himself was inside, in the silent bedroom, listening — 

In the ground the shovel struck something and he crouched to push the soil away. Beyond the trees they were singing, because they were coming ever nearer. They were watching in the trees but could not yet be seen. 

_Glory Glory Hallelujah His Soul’s Marching On._

He sat in the high window. On his lap the weight of an atlas open and yawning at the spine. He was watching at Beulah in the garden and then he watched the woods shiver and reform and he watched Remus walk out of them. As though just born. At the river the eyes were blue and grey. Like disparate gemstones poured by a conjurer from a velvet bag. Circles spreading out where they had thrown stones. 

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. He took the gun out from under the cushions in the parlor and threw it into the water and watched it sink. And then he lay himself down in the loam, and it swallowed. 

Here in the very heart of everything he remained incomplete in himself. Remus was holding the back of his neck and his face and his reddened eyes were so close their noses almost touched. “Where did you go?” 

“I’m here.” 

He did not feel here. Remus pulled away. His mouth was just open. The rain had come and gone unnoticed; the grass was wet and Remus’s hair was wet and he could hear the thunder — he could feel it shaking — from the East hills. They went up the grand staircase together stopping in the shafts of light through the collapsing roof to kiss each other where Remus would allow it. On the neck and cheeks and jaw and collar and forehead and shoulders. His skin was like earth and salt. Tidal seaflats. Birds wheeling black like a strange map in the clouds which pulled apart… 

He was getting pulled place to place as if by umbilical. The door Remus opened was to the room in which Sirius was sure he himself lay dead — bones having molded into his childhood bed like an imprisoned lover in the legends of the oldest Macon families. The room was nearly vacant but for the bed, whose sheets were rumpled (Remus’s sleep of two nights previous, or perhaps eternity), and scraps of his old things about — stones he had found by the creek rounded and smooth as votives — homemade arrowheads and a glass jar of marbles stained with ash. His old clothes clothes mothbitten and nested in by insects, his boots chewed through at the toes by rodents. The doorframe marked charcoal with his progress growing until he was eight or so. Relics of the former self long lost to the ceremony. “Sit,” Remus said. “Against the headboard.” His voice was steady and his eyes — Sirius did. How could he not? Remus sat beside him. He took off his jeans and then his prosthetic with his fingers slipping on the straps and then he pulled his shirt over his head and he lifted his hips carefully to remove his breeches. Sirius started in on his own shirt buttons but Remus stilled him. His hands were warm and clammy and ragged at the nails and calluses. He lay back against Sirius’s chest slowly as though submerging in very cold water. His skin was fever-hot were they touched; already he was half-hard, and his breath hitched when Sirius embraced him. 

“What is — what can I do?” 

“Nothing,” said Remus. His voice echoing inside his body. “Be still. Hold me.” 

He did. He pressed his face into Remus’s shoulder and his neck and his rain-damp hair and breathed. Remus took something from the pocket of his abandoned jeans — the tiny tin of menthol grease Sirius had seen him use once or twice at the join of his false leg. One of their hearts slammed against the cage of ribs. 

“Do you see — ” 

Remus bent his full leg at the knee sliding his foot up the bed as if in invitation to whatever ghost was in the room with them. His own hand slick with grease inside his thigh leaving a shining trail. He shifted to slide his mouth against Sirius’s jaw. 

“ — we have the same body, the same blood, do you see it?” 

He couldn’t see what Remus did but felt him shift. After a moment his back arched just away inside the circle of Sirius’s arms. 

In the mushroom field years ago they had been very young. It was before everything but he thought even then they were not without knowledge. With only a little scrying perhaps they could have seen but they did not bother, and they did not dare. Remus pressed himself back; his eyelids fluttered. Things came back around onto one another as if orchestrated. Days twinned days twinned days with contemporaneous thunderstorms. And as such years twinned years. And selves twinned selves. 

He could feel Remus open himself up as though it were his own body — as though it were his own hand. His head fell back upon Sirius’s shoulder and his breath was wet and sweet against Sirius’s ear and there was a catch in it, a tiny wheeze, when he kindled whatever spark inside himself. For a single strange and shattering moment, hypnotic and breathless and impossible, time seemed motionless — trapped in the humidity like a beetle in amber — but their hearts beat in the same rhythm. It was then that Sirius could no longer hold his weeping somewhere else. Shortly thereafter he came in his pants against the warm shifting weight of Remus’s back and his mind whited out, blissful erasure, like a field of snow. 

\--

He woke sober and fully dressed in the blue dawn light spreading shadow across the room with his spine pressed up against Remus’s like the rough and slipping junction of two tectonic plates. He rose and stretched as quietly as he could manage and in the still and nearly silent morning fog in the garden he stripped and washed in the cold sweet wellwater like a sort of very belated pagan baptism. He had a cigarette naked on the back stoop. He listened to the woods and to the paper atomizing. In the kitchen he found a gaslamp and took it with him into the cellar where he had been heretofore frightened to tread even in Remus’s company. He gave himself a horrible scare when he found the scarecrow but nevertheless with his heart still pounding he dragged it out with him into the pale sunlight. 

When Remus woke, he thought, they would dig a hole together and bury the gun. Then they would walk in the woods for mushrooms and chives, and they would cook the oxtail in the cast iron pan on the fire inside. And then at dusk when the rain had passed they would build a fence around the garden. 

He went looking through the sheds for stakes and chickenwire and he wondered, feeling perhaps still in his blood a tiny trace of the mushrooms, if he always would have wandered with Remus into the woods until they came out around the other end upon some ruined iteration of the old world. In which only they lived but the house was unhaunted. What it would have been like there had there been no secession, and no resulting infection, and no resulting cauterization, and no resulting pain. They would have had to ride together into the deepest and most silent wilderness. Cultivate whatever hospitable scrap they could eke out and live as best they could off its honey and its blood. Or their own, or each other’s. 

After a half hour or so in reverie he thought he saw a coil of chickenwire but when he shifted it he saw it was only canvas. Beneath it was Beulah’s miraculously unshattered guitar ashy and warped but unburnt and unbroken.

\--

It took him another week after that to find the strings Beulah had kept hidden in a kitchen drawer, and another few days after that to figure out how to put them on, and to make a strap for his shoulder with fabric torn from the molding front curtains, which necessitated recalling how to sew, and ransacking the sheds for heavy canvas needles. When he had managed all that he sat on the back stoop in the early morning and played one of Beulah’s old songs as best as he could remember. She had taught him only a few and she had been obliged at first to move his fingers on the strings for him. After a little while he had the chords down and he tried to sing as best he could though his voice was such shit they hadn’t even let him sing Dixieland whilst his battalion marched to Stones’ River. 

“You keep on betting — shit.” 

It was another hour until he had it by which time Remus had come down and Sirius could hear him in the kitchen boiling water for coffee. 

“Just keep on betting and your dice won’t pass — just keep on betting and your dice won’t pass — but someday baby you won’t worry my mind anymore…” 

“I like your singing,” said Remus. There was a wry little smile in the corner of his mouth and he wore his big nightshirt and that was all. Which was altogether fine, because no one had come by even on the front road since they had first come back to the house, and besides the shirt came down almost to his knees. Very carefully Sirius touched his calf. First the whole one and then the false. 

He set about trying to recall another song and Remus went to the garden and inspected it with his hand held over his eyes to keep them from the sun. Sirius watched his bare foot in the soil such a rich red it seemed bloody against his skin. 

The song: he remembered hearing Beulah on the porch playing it in the night. Sometimes another of the scullery slaves had fetched a fiddle. Sirius would lie in bed with the window just open to listen in silence because they would not play if they suspected they were being eavesdropped upon. There was a sort of soul-deep ache in this music that had always confused him when he was young. But when he grew up he realized it was just yearning. One could yearn for any number of things. 

_My girl, my girl,_

_where did you stay last night?_

_I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines_

_and shivered when the cold wind blows._

“Peas are coming up,” Remus called. “Come and see.” 

He put the guitar down against the stoop and the strings made a sonorous sound inside the hollow body like some heavenly chord. When he went to Remus’s side and crouched down enough he could smell the earth indeed he could see a tightly coiled fragile piece of green pushing up through the soil. It was very small and delicate as glass and furled in upon itself like a sleeper. He breathed softly so as not to wake it before it could stand to be woken and he felt Remus brace a palm against his shoulder. From inside he heard the high whistle of the coffee boiling.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> as with all the stories in this series, i've tried to keep everything as accurately historical as possible. please feel free to call me out / correct me on anything i've gotten wrong. i'm [yeats-infection](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) on tumblr - i promise i will be receptive.  
> the songs sirius is playing in the end are two blues standards - ["your dice won't pass"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZhHiL9NyVI) (also sometimes called "someday baby") and "where did you sleep last night" (made famous by [leadbelly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blI2dXHyBj0), later by [nirvana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcXYz0gtJeM))  
> massive thanks due to [imochan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan), for the title, and [montparnasse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse), who assured me this wasn't too bleak and horrible for human consumption


End file.
